I’ve been listening to Pink Flag for more than twenty years and sometimes I find that disturbing.

It can seem like a nostalgia vortex, caused in part by a denial of the present (an avoidance of deciding what to do with my life). I’ll scare myself wondering about this and put the record away for a while (this happens with Smiths albums too) only to remember it six months later, put it on, and feel almost as if I’m hearing it again for the first time.

It’s a return to something immutable.

Thinking of this I was struck by a passage from Boethius’ “The Consolation of Philosophy” (written as a kind of Socratic conversation with an imaginary nurse while he was imprisoned and awaiting execution around 524-5 A.D.):

“[…] Life may be infinitely long, but it does not embrace and comprehend its whole extent simultaneously. It still lacks the future, while already having lost the past. So that which embraces and possesses simultaneously the whole fullness of everlasting life, which lacks nothing of the future and has lost nothing of the past, that is what may properly be said to be eternal. Of necessity it will always be present to itself, controlling itself, and have present the infinity of fleeting time.”

These returns to Pink Flag are like entering a portal to a continuum of experience and energy that is otherwise displaced or hidden in everyday life. It is DIY and immediate in the best possible way — an affirmation of the possibility of freedom. It’s an experience of unrecognized phenomena encompassing both feelings and ideas (that doesn’t posit them as separate). This lack of differentiation is embodied in the instrumentation, the playing, the mix, the intonation of the vocals, the timbres — a humble proof that meaning exists in the interconnectedness of language and passions, the body — that perhaps meaning exists even before we are able to recognize our own existence.

Of course all of this could be my own doing — a story I tell myself — a story I tell myself about myself. Is there more to you than my dreaming?